Sony Develops Magnetic Tape That Holds 185 TB (NOT a Typo). Let’s Make a Playlist with It.

I haven’t used a tape drive for backup for years and frankly, I had no idea that it still was a thing.  But for enterprise-level backup, tape is still the best way to go, apparently–which is why Sony has been significant resources into tape backup R&D.

They just revealed tape that can hold 148 GB per square inch. Put another way, that’s three Blu-Rays’ worth of data crammed into one square inch.

Extrapolating things a little, a cassette’s worth of that tape could hold 185 TB worth of data or 3,750-ish dual-layer Blu-Rays, which, stacked on top of each other, would rise more than 14 feet.  And that’s just the discs.  No cases.

Now let’s get nuts.

A typical Blu-Ray with its 50GB capacity can hold about 70 CDs worth of the music.  That’s equivalent to about 83 hours of .wav files. If we rip everything to MP3, we’re now talking about 830-ish hours of music on a single Blu-Ray.

One of those 185 TB Sony cassettes (189,440 GB)  therefore could hold 3,112,500 hours of MP3s.  That’s about 355 years of music.  That’s one helluva playlist.

(I take no responsibility for any math mistakes. I work in radio after all.)

(Via Extreme Tech)